I have been frustrated lately with the over use of “trigger warnings”.
In this context, the trigger warning they put was “cuddling”. Are you joking????
There is a large number of people aging into maturity from the newer generations who do not use triggers and tags correctly.
Cuddling is not a trigger. Cuddling is not a respectful community standard to mark as a “trigger warnings”. That is a TAG, provided optional at the authors discretion.
Triggers Warnings should be used for serious offensive material that would TRIGGER a survivor into flashbacks, ptsd, depressions and so on.
Think of it like this: a very popular allergy is Peanuts. As a society, a lot of us are respectful to that allergy because it has such a large presence; so we tell people “hey this has peanuts in it, just in case your allergic.” We do this for many extremely common allergies. And even then, it isn’t necessarily mandatory in some settings- it’s just polite and respectful and you look like an asshole for not doing it.
But do we do it for every allergy known to man? No. You can argue we should, sure; but there would be a large disclaimer/lecture before you would be allowed to do any sort of eating anywhere. And respect goes both ways. So a compromise, is we make sure all the most common allergies are adequately warned- and those outlier people who have the extremely rare allergies, they know to curate their own food experiences carefully. (And at the end of the day, the only person responsible for your diet is you).
Trigger warmings are for things related to or like abuse, assault, drugs, violence, murder, alcoholism, rape, racism, so on and so forth. Deep and potentially damaging content for people who unfortunately experienced the worst parts of life. Think of it almost like the rating tiers for movies/games and so on.
Tags are for everything else. And you are not required to cater to everyone person who comments.
You can make individual assessments.
If someone commented of my story and “i’m really triggered by this specific flower, please trigger warn it”; I would ignore and move on. If the story was already finished and I hadn’t used all my tags, I might add it. But its not mandatory.
If someone says “I’m really upset about the almost drowning scene, I almost drowned as a kid”, I would add that in- drowning is a very common horrible thing, and many people have trauma from almost drowning. I didn’t think of it because I don’t see it that way, so when someone commented it I realized that is a massive trigger for a lit of people.
It’s just frustrating seeing ridiculous things tagged as “inappropriate/suggestive/explicit” and it’s literally 2 people sleeping, WITH CLOTHES ON, and cuddling. Even if they didnt have clothes on, inless theres a titty showing, those tags are not necessary. And even if there was a titty, that would be nudity- NOT sexual explicit content.
The system only works if you use it correctly.
I understand the want and need to want to include everyone under the sun- but their simply isnt space or time for that. And the more tags/warnings you put on something, the less likely they will actually be looked at. You need to think critically about whats the most important and move down the list.
You also need to consider genre.
If I’m writing a horror story, and the genre is explicitly labeled horror- there is no need to tag things commonly found in horror stories. Those things should be expected.
Who tried to look for a spicy fic last week and got mad something was labeled spicy (and finished) and it turns out the “spicy” part the author was tagging was them sleeping in the same bed. No action. Just sleeping. 🤦♀️